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How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

danluu.com

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Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#33
post #17

How web bloat impacts users: negatively. Better do your best to fix it. This stuff is simpler than we let it be sometimes, folks.

> This stuff is simpler than we let it be sometimes, folks.

Meanwhile watches a team build a cathedral when all they needed was a shack.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#34
post #21

Since 2000, I've observed the internet shift from free sharing of information to aggressive monetization of every piece of knowledge. So I suspect that is the culprit. If you use the mobile web on the latest iPhone you'll find its unusable without an ad-blocker.

Hm, not entirely true, depending on what you mean with "the internet shifting". The internet has grown , and the free sharing is still going strong. Have a look at Wikipedia, Hacker News, Arxiv.org. To be honest, the stuff that was shared freely in 2000 was not all that great, and most of that which was, is still available. Remember that you had to buy a subscription to Encyclopaedia Britannica back then, and to all…

Google "Roche Ff7 rebirth". I was curious who this character is. In 2000-2012 all the top links would be amazing fan sites and forums describing, discussing, and detailing the character with rich info.

Now it's all AI seo spam LADEN with data mining and ad boat on monolithic sites like Fandom they barely work on the newest iphone.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#35
post #18

Here is how you do web: https://forum.dlang.org/ Observe the speed

Ironically the modern web, built by programmers, is scorned by programmers. You all collectively, persistently, shamelessly decided AngularReactNodeWebpackViteBloat 200mb asynchronous hellspawn websites needed to be made this way.

When all this time, lightweight CSS and anchor links and some PHP was all we needed.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#36
Nobody, nobody, nobody cares about old hardware, performance, users, etc. if anyone cared, React wouldn't be a success. The last time I tried to use the react website on an old phone, it was slow as hell.

LetsEncrypt is stopping serving Android 7 this year. Android 7 will be blocked from 19% of the web: https://letsencrypt.org/2023/07/10/cross-sign-expiration The option is to install Firefox.

Users with old hardware are poor people. Nobody wants poor people around, not even using their website.

“Fuck the user”, that's what we heard from a PO when we tried to defend users, imagine if we tried to defend poor users.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#37
I often use a Thinkpad X220 (which still works for a lot of my usage and I'm not too concerned about it being stolen or damaged) and the JS web is terrible to use on it. Mostly resulted in my preference of using native software (non-electron), which generally works perfectly fine and about as well as on my "more modern" computer.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#38
post #6
post #2

Nobody cares about people with older devices. We've shifted to a mode where companies tell their customers what they have to do, and if they don't fit the mold they are dropped. It's more profitable that way - you scale only revenue and don't have to worry about accessibility or customer service or any edge cases. That's what big tech has gotten for us.

You’re getting downvoted but I think despite the tone you are correct. 10 years ago corporate guidance on web dev was backwards compatibility going back several versions. Now it’s hardly any concern for anything more than 6 months old. More than anything I think it’s because corporate IT has had to modernize due to security. Security now wants you to update constantly instead of running old vetted software. You also…

Who is this mythical end-user with an old browser? Because they don’t show up in browser usage statistics.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-market-share

Chrome is evergreen, even on Android. Safari, after a bit of a fallow period, is updated fairly aggressively, and though it’s still coupled with OS updates, it’s no longer married to the annual x.0 releases.

Mind you, I still believe, and practice, you should write semantic HTML with progressive enhancement. But at the same time, I absolutely do not think you should go out of your way to test for some ancient version of Safari running on a first-generation iPad Pro—use basic webdev best practices, and don’t spend time worrying that container queries aren’t going to work for that sliver of the market.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#39
post #21

Since 2000, I've observed the internet shift from free sharing of information to aggressive monetization of every piece of knowledge. So I suspect that is the culprit. If you use the mobile web on the latest iPhone you'll find its unusable without an ad-blocker.

Hm, not entirely true, depending on what you mean with "the internet shifting". The internet has grown , and the free sharing is still going strong. Have a look at Wikipedia, Hacker News, Arxiv.org. To be honest, the stuff that was shared freely in 2000 was not all that great, and most of that which was, is still available. Remember that you had to buy a subscription to Encyclopaedia Britannica back then, and to all…

And Britannica wasn’t filled with highly moderated propaganda.

Wikipedia is a failed experiment.

Re: How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

#40

Every company stopped caring, especially the companies who were at the forefront of standards and good web design practices, like Google and Apple. Google recently retired their HTML Gmail version, mind you, it still worked on a 2008 256MO RAM Android phone with an old Firefox version and it was simply fast... of course the new JS bloated version doesn't, it just kills the browser. That's an extreme example, yet low…

"Mobile web sucks, an it's done on purpose, to push people to use "native" apps which makes things easier when it comes to data collection and ad display for companies such as Apple and Google."

Partly for sure, but Amazon for example? Or Decathlon? (a big sports/outdoor chain in europe)

Their sites are just horrible on a mobile (or in Decathlons case also on a Desktop, that is not high end), but they also don't offer me their app in plain view, so I have to assume it is just incompetence. The devs only testing everything on their high end devices connected to a backbone.

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